We recently bought a huge, numbered wall clock.
After many married years happily checking the time digitally on our phones or oven, we realized there’s a reason to have a big, obvious clock with hands. Our kids.
My three-year-old has no concept of time. When I tell her she has five minutes before we have to leave the house, I might as well be telling her how to check the oil in our SUV. It’s irrelevant. It’s incomprehensible.
We popped into a department store for a large analog clock to show my kid what five minutes looks like. Watch the hand move from here to here. That’s five minutes.
After rummaging through a back shelf full of cheap artwork, we found a wall clock on clearance for $8. (It’s surprising how challenging it was to find one. Are wall clocks going the way of the home phone?)
We measure time in minutes, but this linear timeline rarely matches our experience. It seems to move quickly, or slowly, or be easy to lose track of.
A friend of mine recently shared her thoughts on the phrase “all in God’s time.” What’s interesting, she said, is God’s time is outside of time. When a prayer seems not to be answered, or results seem to take too long, for us bound by our wall clocks and calendars it feels like God is taking too long or not answering our prayers. But his view on the whole thing is wholly different.
“But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day,” it says in 2 Pt. “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”
We are the minute hands, dutifully ticking through our days one at a time. God sees the whole clock and is not bound by it. We are on a single page of the story of our lives, and God is the author who sees the whole library. When we pray for a baby and struggle to get pregnant, or when we pray for a family member to return to the faith and can’t convince them to join us at church, it can feel like God is taking too long to answer our prayers.
But he can see what we can’t, and knows what part of the story needs to be written first. We need to lean on his timing, which isn’t bound by minutes at all.
I love this story about two monks who were out gardening. The younger monk asked the older one, “If you found out Jesus was about to come, just in a few minutes, what would you do?”
The older replied, “I’d keep digging.”
There is something about living in the present moment, knowing that it’s the right thing to do, and not constantly anxious about future plans, that I would do well to learn. Jesus and my three-year-old are unmoved by time. Perhaps I could not stick so tightly to it, too.
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